Luckily it was still under warranty and Amazon replaced it.
Earlier this week I bought my first Kindle book. Yeah, I know, I still prefer to purchase actual physical books, but two were reference books and one was so cheap I couldn't pass it up. I bought 2000 to 10,000: How to write faster, write better, and write more of what you love; The Emotion Thesaurus; (which gives you words to describe feelings, e.g. "satisfaction" has "a crisp nod," "arms crossed," "clapping," "a sleek walk that draws the eye," and more) and more Western research, Terry's Texas Rangers: The 8th Texas Cavalry.
I downloaded the 2k to 10k and Texas Rangers books to my Kindle, and left the other one in the Cloud.
Last night I tried reading one of the books already on my device, and all I kept getting was a gray screen with an orange "Kindle" icon in the center. Weird. Then I tried to download the third book and nothing happened. I even tried logging on to my account online and sending the book to my Kindle again, but nothing happened.
Well, the first guy I called at Amazon's Kindle support couldn't figure it out, even after we did a hard reset, a deauthorization, and re-sync.
I then had to talk to a Kindle specialist and the only solution was factory resetting the Kindle. Which meant anything on my Kindle that wasn't in the Cloud got nuked. I had side-loaded some apps that are available on the Android store but not the Kindle store, and lost all those. All my free games also got nuked. It wasn't a big deal since I hadn't used the games in a while, but still. Luckily all my books and other apps were restored, but I had to set up my email again and log on to everything all over.
I can imagine this might happen to other people who use their Kindles more often, which would be a major issue. Luckily, everything I paid for was there and it all worked out in the end.
Source:
http://rhymephile.livejournal.com/501038.html